Social Media

Snapchat Photo Hack May Be Fake, But Snapchat Blames Users Anyway

UPDATE, Oct. 11, 4:50 p.m. ET: Someone claiming to be the perpetrator posted on 4chan that no photos would be released. However, the post is anonymous.

Celebrities were the targets of the iCloud security breach, but rumors are spreading on Friday of a far more widespread hack of Snapchat accounts. Bloggers and anonymous 4chan users say 200,000 Snapchat accounts may have been compromised, with photos stolen from a third-party Snapchat app called Snap Save.

Snapchat says that its servers "were not the source of these leaks," and says its users "were victimized by their use of third-party apps." But there's also growing evidence that whatever photos are being leaked are probably old photos that were collected over time.

Whatever the case, this latest security scare has already been dubbed "The Snappening." It comes in the wake of "The Fappening" ("Fap" is Internet-speak for masturbation), in which hundreds of personal photographs of celebrities were apparently stolen from iCloud and posted to websites such as Reddit, 4chan and AnonIb.

Blogger Kenny Withers was the first to report on the alleged Snapchat breach, based on conversations held on the anonymous forum-based website 4chan, although the original threads are no longer on the site.

According to Withers, a 4chan user claimed to have accessed the accounts of 200,000 users of the app Snap Save, a third-party application that allows Snapchat users to save photos sent to them via Snapchat without the sender's knowledge.

There are multiple apps carrying variations of the name "Snap Save" or "SnapSave" available in both the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Mashable reached out to the owner of the more popular "Snap Save," who told us: "My app do[es]n’t save users’s snaps on our server, Snap Save just save[s] snapchats on user’s phone." It is unclear whether other third-party apps store photos on their own servers.

In addition, others are claiming the that the leak is fake and the photos that were being spread on 4chan were previous images that had leaked online, a trend that is not uncommon. Multiple websites and subreddits are based upon sharing "saved" snapchatted photographs.

Independent security and privacy researcher Ashkan Soltani performed a reverse image search on some of the photos included in the alleged leak. Most of the searches pointed back to the same photos already posted on other websites, proving that these photos were previously released.

Snapchat was quick to wash its hands of the potential hacking, releasing the following statement to Mashable. However, the company's statement does hint that the privacy of Snapchat users can be compromised with the use of third-party applications.

We can confirm that Snapchat’s servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks. Snapchatters were victimized by their use of third-party apps to send and receive Snaps, a practice that we expressly prohibit in our Terms of Use precisely because they compromise our users’ security. We vigilantly monitor the App Store and Google Play for illegal third-party apps and have succeeded in getting many of these removed.

The statement implies users themselves are to blame, an unfortunate choice of words that borders on victim-blaming. Anyone using the official Snapchat app could still have their photos harvested by a third-party app — the sharer has no way of knowing if the receiver is using the real Snapchat app or not. Snapchat's statement implies that as long as you don't use a third-party app, you're fine, which simply isn't the case.

In any case, it's Snapchat's responsibility to make sure that users aren't able to take advantage of security flaws. In May, Snapchat settled with the FTC over its misleading claims that messages "delete forever."

Your Snapchat photos can be saved without your knowledge

We downloaded Snap Save, and were able to save photos without the sender's knowledge. (In Snapchat itself, the sender is notified if the recipient tries to save the photo.)

So even if the leak in question is not comprised of new photos, the fact remains that photos sent via Snapchat can be saved by the receiver without the sender's knowledge.

Mashable
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